Local SEO

Many webmasters are drawn to the possibility of passive income by simply ranking high on Google search. While there are websites that still rank with minimal (or even zero) updates from its owners, know that these cases are very rare. There are a lot of factors involved when it comes to Google’s various algorithms, after all. The keywords that you are targeting or are ranking for, as well as their corresponding competitors, would have to be considered as well. It has even been revealed that different search queries have equally dissimilar requirements for freshness.

Google has Confirmed that It Prioritizes Fresh Content

If there is one fact that should convince almost any webmaster to make sure that his content is up-to-date it is that Google themselves have said that they really place greater importance on new content. After all, Google gives a freshness score for every web page that it indexes. This score gradually decreases over time, from the time the page was first discovered by Google and placed on its index. The fact that Google has such a system in place is pretty telling of how important freshness is to a site’s overall SEO.

How Much Change is Actually Needed to Score High Freshness Scores?

It has to be stressed, though, that simply changing a few words on various sentences on your body text would prove to be futile as these kinds of practices rarely impacts the freshness of its content. If Google discovers that you did a lot of changes on larger bodies of texts in your content, though, this would surely cast a favorable light on its freshness. These are core parts of your content that, once updated, would immediately catch Google’s attention.

How Frequently Should You Change Your Content?

It’s not clear as to how Google sees the rate of change in a web page, but what’s certain is that a page that is being updated daily is scored differently from one that only introduces changes to its content once a year.

Do External Link Signals Matter?

There is strong evidence that supports new link signals as playing an important role in freshness as well. This has lead SEO experts to conclude that a web page’s freshness is not solely limited to its main body of text. This is because any change (increase, in particular) in the growth of external links to a site is viewed by search engines as a sign of not only relevance but freshness as well. It has to be noted, though, that the freshness score is still primarily based on what specific topic or news (e.g. celebrities that are getting married this week, recent discovery of a cure to cancer, etc.) these links are pointing to.

It’s Not Rocket Science

Google’s Freshness Algorithm should never make any webmaster feel daunted, at the least bit. In the end, what you really should consider when trying to keep your content as up-to-date as possible is that what counts as fresh content is almost always something that is relevant to your target niche, shareable, and was posted to impart new information. It just takes a bit of know-how, instinct, and anticipation to pinpoint just what it is exactly that people (and Google) would consider as newsworthy. Otherwise, you can always opt to keep yourself informed of current events or developments in your niche through various platforms online.

Author Bio:
Martin Brown is the Marketing Executive of Top SEO Rankers based in New York. Top SEO Rankers evaluates and lists the top Digital Marketing firms and also gives SEO service providers a direct channel for prospective

Marketing automation is an amalgamation of some tasks that are centered on leading your leads (unintentional pun) from the top of purchase funnel (awareness) to the bottom (sale). It can be divided into four broad, interconnected phases:

Planning and Analysis

A well researched start is a good start.

This step involves gathering intel about your customer base so you can categorize them into different groups, based on their readiness and response to your marketing plans. Much like personas in UX research, Planning uses statistics about demographics, devices, habits, etc. and contextually appropriate insights to identify value and selling opportunities.

Targeting

As mentioned above, the customer intel gives you the foundation for target marketing; identify the best market campaigns and offering them to the right leads at the right time.

Using Marketing Automation Tools

This is where your Marketing Automation Tools really take over: creating and managing lists, generating and sending emails and newsletters, tracking, et al.

For all businesses, this results in faster and consistently reliable implementation and management of marketing campaigns. For large enterprises, this could help streamline omni-channel campaigns exponentially.

Drawing Insight

All the data collected by analytics help you draw functioning, applicable insights; you can then implement those straightaway by tweaking and fine tuning your campaign.

This ensures continued progress.

There are marketing automation tools like SAS, HubSpot, Pardot, etc. which can be integrated with WordPress websites to take care of all that without need for much else. Unfortunately, these services are also exorbitantly priced for a small business or entrepreneur.

Since WordPress is a Secret Santa, it doesn’t take much to build your own complete marketing automation toolset without burning a hole in your pocket.

In this post, we’ll take a look at some processes, the tools to accomplish them with, and a few tricks for added fun (and profits) involved in Marketing Automation with WordPress.

Note: With JSON REST API, you can have your developers integrate WordPress with anything. But given below are the best and safest tools/services that work especially well with WordPress.

Email Marketing:

UX Tip: When you customers aren’t thinking of you as a spammer, you are doing things right.

Sending right emails to the right segments of your email list is one of the most significant parts of intelligent marketing automation. And no, email marketing is not obsolete.

The most trusted email marketing tools are also very WordPress-friendly, with special plugins and everything for those who won’t (or can’t) bother with API.

Tool of Trade: MailChimp

Who hasn’t heard of MailChimp? It’s a vast arsenal of features accessible via a really friendly UI capable of turning novices into Pros in a matter of hours.

It’s highly compatible with WooCommerce and hundred more 3rd party tools/services, has a separate suite for mobile apps for management on the go, advanced analytics and intelligent targeting features, great tools for designing the email, and the magic API which lets you change the rules as you see fit.

The pricing plans are extremely bendy. The more subscribers you have, the more you get for free. More features can be added on demand starting with $10/month.

Tip:

You can use MailChimp analytics to generate segments for inactive subscribers in your mailing list (no click from recipient) who have made recent interactions and/or purchases through your website.

Use those special segments to create customized content for them to create higher engagement.

Analytics:

No automation plan can be driven without good hard data to back it up. That’s where analytics come in. And contrary to the general stance, data quality doesn’t depend on the tool collecting it. Data is as good as the insights you can gleam from it.

Although (good) marketing automation tools will offer analytics, there are bigger, better, and more awesome alternatives sitting out there in plain sight.

Tool of Trade: Google Analytics

This is, quite frankly, the only analytics tool you’ll need on your website. It’s that comprehensive. And via Google Tag Manager, even the non-coders can setup Google Analytics on a WordPress website. Check out the tutorial here.

eCommerce, Event tracking, audience data and preferences, high engagement content, bounce rates and conversion rates, and I can go on for hours. There’s no end to the number of things you can track and analyze with this tool.

You can customize the very dashboard to show the data in a way that makes sense to you. There are tutorial videos and helpful descriptions related to every single category and tab, and I have a high tendency to rave about GA when the subject comes up.

Did I mention it’s completely free?

Tip

The Landing Pagestab (In Reporting. Under Behavior >> Site Content >> Landing Pages) is a smart feature which tracks all landing pages (security in numbers) for entry points, engagement, acquisition, interaction, and conversion metrics. For Conversion Rate Optimization, this is perfect.

Social Media:

Social media requires more balancing acts than one would deem necessary between industry-relevant and unique content. This is why automating it is tricky.

Example: Facebook fans of Beyonce will obviously want info on her latest albums, so the social media team shares the links to official sources and portals. But a significant segment would probably also like gossip, so the team can curate the content that reflects the star in a positive light from sources like TMZ, Vanity Fair, etc.

Tool of Trade: Buffer

Buffer curates interesting content from across the web. It lets you schedule the posts for automatic sharing/posting on selected social media channels at the same time. It tracks the most successful posts, multiple social accounts (for an entire team of responders), RSS feeds, image/video uploaders, calendars, link shortening, and more.

Tip

User behavior and session times vary wildly on different social platforms, which is obvious since the popular platforms are unique in their own way. People are on Twitter at all hours, but Intstagram is usually warranted for journeys/meals/manic-selfie-occasions. It also varies within the audience demographics…

To make the most out of social shares, use Buffer’s optimum timing tool to find out the points in time that generate the highest responses/engagement from your fans.

A/B Testing:

A/B testing is a contest where you pit two variations of a single item against each other and measure their performance. Whoever wins gets to stay.

What we’ll use: Nelio A/B Testing

Nelio A/B testing is a brilliant split testing tool made specifically for WordPress. While Google Analytics is great at tracking and testing, some users may find it a bit overwhelming (So many features!) because it requires some effort to properly master.

Tip

UX testing (and CRO) becomes easier when a tool like Nelio is available right in your WordPress admin to take care of split testing of page elements, content, headings, buttons, design, WooCommerce product description pages, etc.

Endnote

Despite all I have said here, know that a truly intelligent marketing automation system can accomplish almost as much as these tools combined. And they have some features that are truly remarkable (HubSpot’s Smart Forms are the best in class).

But these tools are for those who are on a budget and have time (and team) to devote to learning and mastering them. Also: Universal applications.